At 6 a.m. last Thursday, just as Michelle McClain and her five children were in various stages of getting up, dressed and off to school, police busted in the apartment door, guns drawn, and started ordering people to lie face-down on the floor.

Her oldest daughter, 18, was just getting out of the shower. Her 4-year-old and the others were traumatized, she said. "They were asking me 'why are they here, why are they doing this, what did we do?'" McClain told Fox 25 News.

Good questions, ones the Framingham Police and Mass. State Police should have asked before they burst in on the McClain family – with a warrant made out for the apartment next door.

For most of our country’s history, laws and procedures recognized the common law principle that a person’s home was his castle, and that police must knock and be recognized before entering. America’s Founders, still mad over the invasions of colonists’ homes by British soldiers, prohibited "unreasonable searches and seizures" in the Bill of Rights.

But no-knock raids were legalized as part of the "war on drugs," justified by the fear that suspects would destroy evidence while the police waited at the door. They have become standard operating procedure, with police drug raids often accompanied by flash-bang grenades and high-tech battering rams. There were around 3,000 no-knock raids in 1981, one study found, and more than 50,000 in 2005.

With that many raids, there are bound to be mistakes, many of them more tragic than last week’s address mix-up in Framingham. In 1993, a Boston minister died of a heart attack after police mistakenly burst into his apartment. Firefights have broken out when people in the house being raided assumed the invaders were criminal gangs, not police. It was in the aftermath of one of these "dynamic entries" in 2011 that a Framingham police officer shot Eurie Stamps Sr. as he lay face-down in his home.

This time, no one was shot when police broke down the door of a Framingham home. Police Chief Kenneth Ferguson and Town Manager Robert Halpin apologized to McClain. The school resource office offered to help reassure the children. That’s the kind of positive response to trouble between police and civilians that was noticeably absent after Eurie Stamps was killed.

The war on drugs still rages, even as people increasingly recognize its failures. Thursday’s raid in Framingham was one of more than a dozen in six communities targeting a cocaine distribution ring. Police seized drugs, cash, weapons and the cars the suspects allegedly used to conduct business. The war will keep raging until the people, through their elected representatives, decide on a different way to address the demand for drugs.

But the collateral damage to people like the McClain family isn’t necessary. All the police have to do is knock on the door, wait for an answer, and treat the people inside as citizens, not the enemy.